With Hamas Takeover, Tough Calls for Israel

washingtonpost.com:
By Scott Wilson

JERUSALEM -- Since the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, Israel has faced an increasingly complex set of military options to stop attacks from the territory, and a debate over its humanitarian responsibilities for the strip's 1.4 million people.

The political split between the West Bank and Gaza has also strengthened calls in Israel to abandon the idea of a Palestinian state, which was at the core of the Oslo peace accords signed in 1993....

"The only way Abbas can be rescued is by getting a political process started with Israel," said Walid Salem of the Panorama center, a Palestinian institute in Jerusalem that promotes democracy. "Otherwise, what happened in Gaza will happen in the West Bank within two years."

But former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who heads the opposition Likud Party, and other politicians have redoubled their arguments that the idea of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank is over.

Netanyahu has revived a proposal calling for Jordan, most of whose residents are of Palestinian descent, and the West Bank to enter into a "confederation" that would bind them together economically, politically and on security matters. Such an arrangement would presumably leave much of the West Bank, at least that portion Israel has effectively annexed with its separation barrier, under Israeli control.

Under that proposal, Egypt would assume responsibility for Gaza, which it held before the 1967 Middle East war. But Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic political movement that is President Hosni Mubarak's chief opposition. ...

Yaron Ezrahi, a political science professor at Hebrew University, said Israel's "policy moves over the years have been consistently rational in the decision-making stage and utterly irrational in terms of understanding the consequences."

"It has always thought of its policy toward the Palestinians and the region as moves in a chess game," he said. "But the situation has always been far more like trying to keep a small boat steady in a rushing river."